Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn chose a smaller room for Anora’s sex scenes: the 2 actors, director Sean Baker and producer Samantha Quan. Explaining why they declined an intimacy coordinator during Variety’s Actors on Actors conversation on December 17, 2024, Madison said, “For our film, it was a choice that I made.”
“I felt more comfortable having it be just them.” — Mikey Madison
In the 2024 film, Madison plays Ani opposite Eydelshteyn’s Ivan. Their scenes include his backflip onto a bed before sex. The opening also features improvised club lap dances, but Baker described a different approach to filming the sexual encounters.
At a London Q&A reported on October 10, 2024, Baker called that work “incredibly clinical,” with “no improv.” Madison explained in the same conversation, “We talked at length about each scene.”
Preparation included Baker and Quan demonstrating positions while clothed, Madison said in her October 11, 2024, Sight and Sound interview. A Vulture interview from October 9, 2024, described Baker closing the set for the first sex scene and promising careful coverage.
Madison said in that interview, “This was the first sex scene I’d ever done.” Eydelshteyn described his shyness as “racing, racing, racing inside of me.”
Madison said in the December Actors on Actors conversation that filming went quickly. Baker later explained in a Screen interview published January 28, 2025, that she’d had the option of bringing her parents, agents or an intimacy coordinator.
Her account also distinguished her own comfort from the character’s relationship to nudity. During Actors on Actors, she described Ani as someone who “wears her nudity more like a costume.”
Discussing the decision again in MovieMaker’s interview published December 20, 2024, Madison said, “I think that was the best choice for this specific film.”